Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Casse-pipe

There are things made not to be colored. The world is one of them. All black, all tired, the houses clinging to their balconies, the ruins stretching like scars for what remains of old Europe. Spraying colors onto life is lying. Everyone lies, fortunately. A world without lies would certainly be a much more boring world.

I don't need love, I don't need anything. I just need a faint light to guide my path through this night.

It's all black, a candle light illuminates what little remains still alive in the life of a tired twenty-year-old who, bored by the world, excited by a few too many drinks, tired of relying on his maternal Uncle's money, with a suicide still before his eyes, decides to enlist in the French army and depart for the first great War.

The candle illuminates the brigadier Le Mehu's helmet, there, with elbows on the table, at the back of the room. Between him and the boy, a floor of flesh and a stench from another world.

-Brigadier! He's enlisted!
-Let this fool in.

The sweetest words that will be addressed to him on this long night.

Why did you enlist? Have you ever been a coachman? A tailor by trade sometimes? Thief, my young man? Acrobat by any chance? You're not a stableman either? Perfumer to close? Charcoal burner then? Knife grinder? So what the hell are you doing coming to the 17th heavy cavalry? Eh? You don’t even know, braggart? Is there nothing left to eat at your house? Has the oven come down?

There was nothing to answer. Nothing to answer to that shit of Rancotte. He kept tapping his whip on the reinforcements of his pants. Occasionally, he’d let out two belches right in the face of the boy from Paris.

The battalion outside in the night, the wind traveling from low to high, the cold offending jackets, the rain bending backs. At night for a word, a lost word never to be found again... with some luck, and with a favorable wind, it might have reached Germany. The changing of the guard remains jammed, the word has flown away again. No, it's not Margherita. It's not the name of a battle. Le Mehu fidgets, Rancotte will scalp him. The whole battalion closed in a barn drinking wine sold to them by the stable hand and Mehu tossing and turning in the dark, hoping Rancotte is drunk enough not to see him.

There are things that are made to be rejected, mistreated, torn apart. Louis-Ferdinand Céline is all this and more.

Then find it, God's pig! Where is your word, bandit?